How big can the city be?
By default, 36 km^2 in 9 interconnected 2x2km squares, so you don't have to make a 6x6km city if you don't want. With modding you can build up 100 km^2 (25 2x2km squares).
The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
21–30 of 189 posts
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#22Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if…
That actually sounds quite realistic to me. Part of traffic management is dealing with, and trying to predict, stupidity.
In real life you tend to have the exact opposite problem. People changing lanes the second the lane they are in starts slowing down without any forward planning about where they might have to go next.
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#23Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City.
I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#24Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City. I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.
There is a steam version that at least for me works flawlessly.
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#25Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if…
Living in Austin, this seems like a fairly realistic problem.
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#26The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games - 1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features. 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And, 3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus rout…
Did it actually have much of a "realistic simulation" though? One of the main reasons I didn't buy the game is because people tore it to shreds for utilizing the same exact algorithm for determining traffic as they did water and other utilities. Also people pointed out that like people themselves weren't actually simulated in anyway they just woke up in the morning found the first open commercial job to work at and a…
Well, maybe not "real" as in the "real world", but "real" enough to have fun. SimCity 5 faced an ordeal in trying to be too real; they traded off other vital entities (map size, gameplay features) for getting this simulation right!
It's also been stated that this game has, by default, a very "easy" gameplay which may have contributed to siding to being a bit less realistic but sufficiently real for playing and having fun.
The traffic is a mess, true. They'll patch it up with a better algorithm hopefully. It's still fun though. I recently had a couple of industrial buildings burn to ashes because the firetrucks were caught up in a jam! Now that's quite possible!
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#27The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games - 1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features. 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And, 3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus rout…
> 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre.
It irks me how SimCity 5 is praised for that. The Caesar series had pure agent-based simulations in the 1990s, and somehow had none of the agent routing bugs SimCity 5 had. How can being worse than your competition 20 years ago be considered an accomplishment?
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#28The Colossal Order team, in my opinion was very lucky! There were three games - 1. SimCity 4 with the statistical simulation model, big maps (region-wise) and plenty of features. 2. SimCity 5 with a pure agent-based simulation model (it had flaws though, especially traffic), but again the series pioneered a new way of creating games in this genre. And, 3. Cities XL having a HUGE map, few unique features like bus rout…
Did it actually have much of a "realistic simulation" though? One of the main reasons I didn't buy the game is because people tore it to shreds for utilizing the same exact algorithm for determining traffic as they did water and other utilities. Also people pointed out that like people themselves weren't actually simulated in anyway they just woke up in the morning found the first open commercial job to work at and a…
If you have a Windows XP VM lying around somewhere, take a look at Caesar III (should be on GoG). Agent based simulation done right, in 1998.
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#29Skylines looks promising, but I'm still reserving judgement. It's a shame that EA completely botched the new Sim City. I wish EA would port Sim City 4 to Windows 7/8/10. I would pay good money for that. As it is, I can't get Sim City 4 to work on Windows 7 without frequent freezes and crashes.
Have you tried the gog.com version?
Re: The 'SimCity' Empire Has Fallen and 'Skylines' Is Picking Up the Pieces
#30Skylines is hands down my favorite game right now and is directly responsible for my highly unproductive, but fun, weekend. But it's not without faults. For me one of the telling things will be how they handle a very similar problem that EA had with the latest Sim City. Traffic. Once your city becomes a certain size the game goes from City Builder to Traffic Management Simulator. Which itself wouldn't be a problem if…
Maybe this is encouragement from the game to build alternative transport options like light rail, trams, move jobs closer to residential districts or establish suburbs to lower city population, tax cars more, build bike lanes, build more sidewalks, etc. In real life, there's not usually a solution for traffic. If you build out more streets, people are incentivized to drive more. I'd love this game to be this realisti…
Im hesitant to say that's the intended result but it is what happens. I found myself planning new districts entirely around this problem with bus, metro, and pedestrian walkways (maybe its just me but right now commuter rail seems to be basically unused and doesn't seem to do anything). So it definitely does force you to think about how you're laying out your city and plan things out beyond then just tossing down a grid and calling it a day.